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THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2022
Child care desert forces tough choices for parents
By ZACK DEMARS
The Bulletin
Darci Palmer was opti-
mistic she’d return to work
from maternity leave with-
out too much trouble.
She was hopeful the three
babysitters she and her part-
ner, Mary Hearn, had lined
up would give her enough
time to let her keep her job
(and the family’s health
insurance) and for Hearn
to continue her self-em-
ployed work as a real estate
developer.
That was a month ago.
Then, babysitters backed
out, and the family was once
again without a solid plan
for how to care for their
twins. The process made the
couple realize the impor-
tance of fi nding high-quality
child care they can trust.
“I took for granted before
having kids — if there was
child care out there and it
had a license, that’s good
enough — that it was that
simple,” Palmer said. “But
there’s so much more to it.
It’s really like fi nding some-
body to marry. There’s so
much to it when you’re trust-
ing someone with your most
precious — I don’t know.
My precious babies. I didn’t
see that coming.”
Hearn and Palmer’s sit-
uation, with the support
of Palmer’s mom, fl exible
work hours and the fi nancial
resources to aff ord care in
the fi rst place, is better than
what many parents face.
Still, the family is caught in
the middle of a broken sys-
tem trying to balance work-
ing and parenting in a tri-
county area that experts call
a child care desert.
Like
many
regions
nationwide, central Ore-
gon faces an overwhelm-
ing lack of child care, where
thin profi t margins and high
barriers to entry mean there
aren’t enough options to go
around, leaving parents to
scramble to fi nd care they
can aff ord.
Providers fund their
businesses from two main
sources: Parents and gov-
ernment subsidies. Over-
whelmingly, parents take on
the majority of that fi nancial
Ryan Brennecke/The Bulletin
Darci Palmer soothes her infant son, Nico, while working in her home offi ce in Bend.
burden — parents paid 71%
of the $1.2 billion spent on
early care and education in
2017, for example, accord-
ing to Oregon State Univer-
sity researchers.
Since state regulations
require a certain number of
employees per child, much
of a provider’s cost is wages,
according to Karen Prow,
the director of child care
resources for NeighborIm-
pact, which assists providers
in the region.
“So when you’re talking
about mostly wages that
need to be paid out with the
income that comes in from
families, there’s that uncom-
fortable space of not want-
ing to charge families more
than they can aff ord to pay,”
Prow said. “But you don’t
have enough money coming
in to actually pay your bills,
to hire high-quality staff , to
give them a living wage —
especially in an area like
central Oregon.”
That means the costs for
child care are high. While
prices can vary by locale,
hours and type of care, the
median annual price of tod-
dler care in an Oregon child
care center was $15,900 in
2020 — a fi gure that rose
faster than the incomes of
families with children in the
state.
The average family
in Deschutes County, for
example, pays $875 per
child per month for full-time
care, according to ChildCare
Aware of America, a nation-
wide child care research
and advocacy organization.
That’s $70 more a month
than the state average, 18%
of the county’s median
household income for a fam-
ily with a young child, and
51% of the median house-
hold income for families in
poverty.
Hearn’s and Palmer’s
ideal child care situation
would be something in their
own home, where a nanny
or babysitter could care for
the two 3-month-olds while
Hearn and Palmer worked
from home, giving them
a chance to stay focused
on their work while being
around their kids.
But their child care story
has been a saga of fore-
stalled options: The plans for
a mishmash of babysitters
came after Sprouts Montes-
sori, a school in their neigh-
borhood they’d enrolled the
3-month-olds in, decided
it would no longer enroll
babies.
And some of the options
they have found didn’t work:
A nanny who wouldn’t get
vaccinated against COVID-
19 and open slots at a day-
care where a friend had neg-
ative experiences.
For now, Palmer’s mother
has off ered to help, staying
in Bend for a while.
“Having someone who’s
COVID-safe, part of our
family, able to take care
of them in the way that we
want has been a total life-
saver,” Palmer said. “She’s
gotten us through. With-
out her I don’t think we’d
have our sanity, I probably
wouldn’t still have my job.”
But they’re not sure they
can keep asking her to help
much longer.
Neither parent wants to
sacrifi ce their career just
because they can’t fi nd
child care that works best
for them. Just a few weeks
ago, Palmer hadn’t consid-
ered the possibility of put-
ting her career on pause —
but now, after months of
searching for the right child
care option that would get
her back to work, and with
just a few weeks left of her
mom’s support, she’s more
open to the idea.
Palmer and Hearn aren’t
alone in their struggle to fi nd
child care that works for
them.
A 2020 study from Ore-
gon State found that most
counties in Oregon lacked
enough child care spots.
Deschutes County had
enough slots for one in
three kids between 3 and 5,
while Jeff erson County had
enough slots for 44% of
that population and Crook
County had just 25%, the
study found.
The pandemic certainly
hasn’t helped. Experts say
many child care providers
have closed their doors after
COVID-19 safety measures
raised costs and declining
parental income reduced
enrollments and revenue,
and data from Child Care
Aware, a national child care
advocacy nonprofi t, sug-
gest Oregon lost a quarter of
its child care slots between
December 2019 and July
2020.
Palmer said she feels like
her mom’s support is “giv-
ing us another two weeks to
fi gure things out. And if we
don’t, I don’t know. I give
two weeks notice? Hon-
estly, I don’t know. This is
so hard.”
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